Interview with a Ghost Writer
01/29/2014
by: Pierre Speakes
Actually, this is not an interview with a ghost writer, but actually an interview with an unknown author, who actually considers himself a ghost writer, albeit he is his own ghost.
I will get to his name momentarily, which in his own words during the interview he told me, “no sense rushing with small details, or large ones for that matter, if you are a ghost anyway.”
I came across this writer quite by accident, as I was doing a research piece on politics in Michigan, and this authors name came up in the google search. He actually had a Web Site, and to my surprise, was interesting enough to keep my attention and want to try and get a hold of him. He lives in Michigan, and although he shares a common name with a very rich and powerful family of that state, he has no connection with them, “at least not that I’m aware of, I’ve never received even so much as a Christmas card from them, and the fact of the matter is, they spell their last name with one ‘s‘ whereas mine has two.” The authors (ghost) name is Dale DeVoss.
Mr DeVoss has been writing for some 40 years now and started out in college as mostly a poet. He hung out in literary circles while going to college and was content to be a struggling artist, which in those times, the early 70’s, was an honorable pursuit. However, fate intervened and a serious automotive accident his father suffered sent him packing home to help out the family business. In the 40 year period after that fateful day he has spent the hours and minutes when he could to write, which went from poetry to prose to short stories and novels. “ I have had a good run of small successes in my artistic life, but nothing close to anything I could quit my day job for.”
In the 40 years of his writing career he has written 4 novels, 20 short stories, numerous prose and poetry pieces, enough to fill up a good solid book, wrote some songs, painted, did public readings (mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan). Yet through all of that he has only a few prose pieces and a couple of articles written that have been published. Only one of his novels has been published, “ Although I published it myself, which really doesn’t count in the real world, and was read only by family and friends.”
My original instincts told me that I had to find out more about Mr. DeVoss and the following interview secures for me the fact that I was glad I did. Here then is that interview with the “Ghost.”
PS: Thank you Mr DeVoss for allowing me to do this interview with you, and taking the time to indulge us into the insights of your artistic life.
DD: Oh my pleasure entirely, please just call me Dale. It is I who should thank you for your interest.
PS: Well then, let’s get right down to the heart of the matter. You said earlier that it was in college, I believe you said Eastern Michigan University, where you started your interest in writing and being a poet.
DD: Actually, what I meant to say was, that it was in college that I began to think of myself as a poet and artist. I was very interested in reading, and poetry, at an early age, and at age 14 discovered the poetry of John Keats, who really blew me away.
PS: Well then, did you write any poems at this young age?
DD: Yes. They were not very good, and none of them survive today due to the fact that I mostly gave them to girlfriends at the the time, and the others were thrown out by my mother who deposited all my papers and things in the trash when I went to college, and my parents moved. But like I say, they weren’t very good, although they would have shown an attempt to try and emulate John Keats, or William Blake, which would later on help me with my poetic pursuits at college. And even though those poems of my youth no longer exists, I did write about that period of my life in my second novel ‘The Road to Golden’, which is based on my early teen years.
PS: Yes. We’ll get back to the novels in a bit, but let’s talk about how the nucleus of that poet/artist developed in college.
DD: It was in my freshman year living in a dorm when things started to happen. In 1970 if you were a long hair, or freaks as we called ourselves, you had no problem meeting with anyone of the same ilk. It was before dinner one night and I was partaking of a certain appetite stimulant just before going down to the cafeteria. Well, by the time I got downstairs there was a small crowd of us freaks and they were listening to a guy blowing on the saxophone, another guy was on piano. I got into the groove of the beat and started reciting ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The crowd that had gathered was getting into it heavy and especially one guy who kept saying “go”. After the impromptu jam the guy came up to me and asked me what it was I was reciting and I told him Keats. He told me he was into the Beats who I knew of marginally and after dinner did I want to listen to some ‘Bird’ and I didn’t know who he was talking about. After dinner we spent three hours listening to jazz and talking literature and the ball got rolling there. His name is Gregg and he is a friend to this day and someone I consider to be one of the best poets on the planet.
PS: Hmmm, does your friend have some published works I can access?
DD: Probably not. Like me he had some things published in some Broadsides that have long ago expired and I’m not sure if there are any anthologies still out there. What I want to go back to though is that Gregg in his freshman year submitted a poem , ‘Ode to Walt Whitman’, that won first place in the University Poetry Anthology, which was almost unheard of for a freshman. He also did the front cover artwork which is a drawing, ink I believe, of Whitman, which again is first rate. He was asked to be on the judging panel after that, which was another honor.
PS: With such an auspicious beginning I’m surprised that your friend wasn’t more of a celebrated poet.
DD: Well at first it all seemed so exciting but then when you get into the realities, i.e., academia, it all becomes this sort of pomp and circumstance stuff that we were totally not into. I helped him judge some of the poetry that was submitted and usually we laughed so hard at the truly horrible stuff that we just couldn’t go on pretending anymore. We did however, because of that, hook into a sub level group of poets and writers that were more into our type of thing, and it got us both jobs at the local bookstore. This period can all be explored in my first novel ‘Good Shoes’.
PS: Ah, another novel about you being a poet?
DD: (Laughs) Yes. You see I thought it would be more accessible for folks to dig poetry if it were in an adventure type novel. (laughs again). It was funny but when I was working with an editor on my novel ‘The Road to Golden’, his comment was “well you certainly should win the John Keats admiration award.” (laughs harder).
PS: So how did the process begin for you of being the poet and then becoming the novelist?
DD: This happened gradually over a ten year period. One of my classes in college was 20th century novel, and one of the selections on the syllabus was Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Of Time and the River’. I read this book non-stop and got into the character so much I felt as though I was living through Elmer Gantry. I then went on to read all of the Thomas Wolfe novels. My friend Gregg said, “well if you like Wolfe I think you’ll dig Kerouac.” So I got a copy of ‘On the Road’ and was really pumped up about it. I told my friend Gregg “man we got to go meet this guy.” This was 1971, and of course Gregg told me of his death. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me, I mean here was someone that spoke directly to me on my level. It was amazing. So then I began to write in a prose style, because it was so much more freer in structure than poetry. Gregg and I were getting weary of sitting around in these poetry circles and everyone reading their own psycho therapy type poems. I read everything I could by Kerouac that year, devouring all the books. I guess I got into Kerouac so much was because his ideas on how to look at things were parallel with Gregg’s and mine. Even though Gregg started to get into Buddhist doctrine at that time we still shared that Kerouac way of seeing things, you know ‘Ones that never say a dull thing’ type lifestyle. I t was a small kind of enlightenment for me at the time.
PS: So you went from one JK to another JK then?
DD: Well yes, (laughs). I didn’t put Keats aside though. Like I said I incorporated him into my novel TRTG, by following the storyline of his poem ‘Hyperion’ & the ‘Fall of Hyperion’. So at that time the two JK’s were working together for me to create that novel.
PS: Okay then. Let’s talk about you first starting to write your novels. What type of regiment, or discipline, did you employ to go from writing two or three pages of words to 300 pages?
DD: Kerouac helped me there. Actually it was a friend of Kerouac’s, I believe his name is Ed White, in his Denver days, who suggested that Kerouac write like a painter and visualize his scene and then write it with words like a painter would paint a scene with brush. For me, and it took a while, but I could see these scenes flashing through my mind and I would write down what I was seeing. Pretty much like a director doing a movie, I would direct my own movie and scribble it down, at first tediously on a typewriter. I did very little editing then.
PS: Much like Kerouac too, eh? “First thought, best thought.”
DD: Well that is kinda a myth about Kerouac, as he actually did quite a bit of editing of his works. ‘On the Road’ actually began way back in the 40’s, in little journal notebooks, and by the time he did his famous two weeks with the scroll he already had the book finished in his mind, so he at that time just put all that earlier stuff together in one piece. It’s not to say that Kerouac wasn’t capable of pouring out great spontaneous stuff, as was his genius, but let’s face it Kerouac was in the writing game when there were all these tremendous people, like Robert Girouax, Maxwell Perkins, etc. to give those exceptional artists, like Kerouac the special eye it took to get things in published form. I remember when I sent my first novel out and I thought it was going to raise eyebrows and bring attention to my stuff immediately, but instead what I received was ‘Cut this out, don’t do that, revise the whole beginning, etc, etc’, and the editor even told me ‘The days of Maxwell Perkins are over I’m afraid.” Boy, it sure was a real eye opener. (Laughs loudly).
PS: What type of things did he want you to cut, or not do?
DD: The big thing that bugged him was that I did everything in capital letters and very little punctuation, mostly just (---) lines where I would begin a new sentence. You see I was trying to be like what I thought Kerouac was doing, just writing away and not stopping, and not letting things like periods and what is capitalized and what isn’t, just keep recording the images that were running through my mind.
PS: Were you writing this stuff by hand or were you using a typewriter from the beginning?
DD: At first I did everything by hand, because that didn’t involve having to buy a typewriter, and, ink and paper, just a pencil and scrap paper. The days however of Hemingway were over and handwriting just didn’t cut it anymore, so I eventually paid $25.00 for this used typewriter that was used at an Engineering Company. It was huge and was used to print on Mylars, or plastic transparencies for job sheets. It was not too portable (laughs), as it weighed about 50 lbs. , but I loved it, because now I was doing things professionally, and I felt like that was the only thing holding me back. (Laughs louder). Little did I know how really far I had yet to go. (laughs).
PS: What year did you purchase the typewriter?
DD: I purchased it in 1981, so everything from 1970 to 1981 was done by hand, that is my publishable material. I still kept my journals in handwriting form. I also moved back to Ann Arbor in 1980 as I wanted to be close to the artistic action. There was a place where artists would hang out called the ‘Del Rio’ and along with weekly jazz they also had poetry reading sessions there. This was long before the popular ‘Slam Poetry’ became vogue and was a pretty good gig at the time. My friend Gregg was also living in Ann arbor at the time and we picked up where we left off in the 70’s.
PS: Okay then. let’s return to the novels again. Tell me about the four novels you have completed and what state they are currently in.
DD: I have finished three full length novels, ‘Good Shoes’, ‘The Road to Golden’, and, ‘The Clandestine Garden’, written in that order. The fourth is more a novella than a novel length book at 120 pages, the others are in the 300 page length. I have started a fifth novel and am into 20 pages of that right now. I have plans for it being the longest of my novels when it is finished. I also have about twelve short stories that would fill out a book length easily.
PS: So with all this publishable material what have been the roadblocks for you to get published?
DD: Whew, well where to begin. First of all you have to consider how much the publishing business has changed from the 70’s when I began to get in the ring. You could no longer just write a novel and submit it as is. Now, in addition to be a writer, you needed to be, an editor, layout whiz, have synopsis, cover letters, etc, etc, etc. This all acquired more and more steam in tandem with the MFA programs that were popping up all over in Universities. Now, huge piles of manuscripts were pouring into agents from these programs completely flooding the agents doorsteps. Of course those MFA program’s gave their students all they needed from A-Z to get noticed. The lone unknown wolf out in the woods howling was mostly drowned out. Secondly, the readers market was changing drastically. When more and more women came into the forefront obviously this attracted a larger women’s market and so it was only natural that publishers were anxious to get as much of that market as possible.
PS: Would you consider yourself writing towards a male market?
DD: No. Not at all. I write for a human market, in fact, the women that have read my novels have all given me praise for the characters, both male and female. I write about the human condition and the interaction we all struggle with in our lives.
PS: So why then all of the rejections to publish?
DD: Well, take a look at what’s out there getting published. You’d have a hard time finding period piece novels that are built around fairly normal type relationships, even though I think personally that there is a market out there for it. Look at the success for something like ‘Almost Famous’. There’s no big social-psycho logical tragedy happening there, just real people getting caught up in the times, and it was a hit at the theater. Like any other business, the publishing business is built around making money to survive and they want the home run books, not necessarily the ones that would initially have a small niche and then grow from there. It’s frustrating but you have to just keep at it, you know, put your ten thousand hours in.
PS: Alright then, what’s on the horizon for you now?
DD: I am working to polish and enhance my website @ daledevoss.com. Also I am starting my 5th novel and editing my novella, ‘The Thin Line’. I will write no matter the publishing or not, because it is something that is in my being that needs to happen. It makes me a whole person and puts my mind at ease.
PS: Well thank you very much and good luck to you in the future.
DD: Thank you. My pleasure.